


The 62,019 Year-Old Dictionary by Robin Caveman

by ToodleOfDeeth



Category: Ghosts (TV 2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Gay Character, Canonical Character Death, Character Development, Crack at points, Developing Friendships, Family History, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Julian is bisexual!, Light Angst, Slice of Life, The Captain is Gay (Ghosts TV 2019), Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 02:52:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19142089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToodleOfDeeth/pseuds/ToodleOfDeeth
Summary: Robin is old. Like, older than trees, rivers, lakes and civilisation, old. He keeps a list of words he learns as time goes by, and eventually, discovers a few things he'd always known but never knew the word for.Written for the Ghosts Fanworks Challenge: 'Time'





	The 62,019 Year-Old Dictionary by Robin Caveman

As a river does, times came and went, always being replaced by something similar but undoubtedly new, and as a river does, people changed over time, going from skin-wearing bipeds to people of culture, using stone tools, then metal and cloth, then evolving machinery to do the hard work for them. 

Over time, from what Robin had seen, the Human Race changed from an understandable, discernible collection of attitudes, to a mess of sensibilities, beliefs, actions and reactions, where one eyebrow raise could mean around thirty different things, and a quirk of the lips carried around a thousand meanings. It wasn't fun, learning social structure not through participation but through observation, but four hundred thousand years was a long time to adjust to speech, and an even longer to see how things changed.

He supposed, as a river does when it approaches the sea, cultures get bigger and more complex over time. He understands things (status, clothes, food,  _ food, _ metal, machinery, love, glass,  _ FOOD _ ) gradually, and eventually, adds it to the list of things he understands. 

**Food**

Food,  _ food,  _ the bane of his existence, which directly lead to him eating the wrong kind of berries and lead his brother into the path of a cave lion, had turned into something of a culture in and of itself - meat wrapped in pastry, then washed with egg and baked, smeared in sauces of beef drippings and blackcurrants, eaten with utensils made of metal (metal!) and not wooden sticks or their fingers. For a long while, fingers were not used  _ at all  _ to handle cooked food, and while Robin was no stranger to cooking things (meat always tasted better cooked over a fire, truth be told), it was a marvel that it had gotten so complex over such a short period. For a couple hundred years he thought bread would be the new root vegetable, but then people decided to use the flour in different ways, creating a whole new slew of things that without a doubt would have smelt and tasted delicious.

Cooking berries was something that never occurred to him, but seeing women spoon it into their children’s mouths as a treat made his own water down his chin, and he wished not for the first time that he had been alive to taste that too. And potatoes became a staple in a way no one expected. 

The first time he saw it was when Button House wasn't too old - maybe a hundred years or so - when a man in a carriage sold the head maid a bunch with the stalks and leaves still attached. They obviously didn't know what they were, and Robin admirably didn't either, but when they eventually decided upon using the leaves as a salad and threw away the vegetable itself it was doomed to not be welcomed back into the house any time soon. 

They did, eventually, warm up to it, and the ways that they made it! Boiled, stewed, mashed, cut and fried in goose fat, sliced and roasted, chopped and formed with fish, eaten as a topper to a beef stew thing, and even the water they boiled it in was used as a soup thickener or as something to feed the pigs. 

“When I was alive,” Mary said, “I has a favourite food. It were sausages, with cabbage and with turnips.”

Robin looked at her, “Sausages?” he asked, “Pig?”

“Oh, yes,” she nodded her head, almost solemnly, “Sausages were pigs. That brother o’ mine, Richard, liked ‘um with Apples.”

“Apples!” Robin shook his head, “Have with meat? No.” 

“Right! Was gross. What’s wrong with him, I am not to know.” She shook her head, a plume of smoke coming from her hair as she did. 

He, nor anyone else in the house, didn't comment on how she still spoke as if people from the past were still alive. All of them did it sometimes, even if, like Mary, their loved ones had been dead for at least a few years. Sometimes, it was easier to assume that they were well, happy, and alive. 

“Blissful ignorance,” Julian called it. 

“A painful reminder,” sighed Thomas. 

What was he talking about? 

Ah, right. Food.

There was just too much to talk about when it came to food. They all had things they wished, longed, to taste again. The Captain favoured hare, while Julian was a fan of Burger King (whatever that was), and Fanny missed the turkey at Christmas dinner most of all. Kitty mentioned sponge cake with a sighing tone, Thomas bemoaned sherry with a passion, and Humphrey talked of swan that was re-dressed in its skin and feathers after it had been cooked. Pat was an outlier - he talked not of what he missed eating, but the things he had never tried. 

“Carbonara! I never understood how they avoided scrambling the eggs. Oh, and dumplings, not the English kind over stew, but the ones steamed and fried. My neighbours, the Yuzikis, made them every other Wednesday. Goodness, the  _ smell! _ Lemongrass, and something sweet and spicy - ginger, maybe - and soya sauce was always their staple too. Don't get me started on when they broke out the fish sauce though, that was awful, especially when they spilled it over the counters…”

Robin could name the things he wanted to try too, and modern food seemed to be the kind he would be interested in. When teens broke into the back kitchen when the late Mrs Button passed in 2018, and the house was abandoned, they brought with them a few things - Cans of beer (Julien told him about it), bags of crisps (salted, the packet said), and two cardboard boxes of pizza. He couldn't smell it, of course, but the way the cheese stretched out over the bread, with rich tomato sauce smothering almost all of the surface, and meat (meat!) placed carefully in little patterns on each slice, made it look like a work of art - if he had the option to redecorate, he’d want it on the walls. If he could write a book, he’d write it about pizza. Those teens had good taste in food, but not so much in music. It mustn’t have been much more of an effort to bring better music. 

Not that he would know, since he was, you know, dead. 

**Clothes**

Clothes were, in everyone’s opinion, getting worse. 

He didn't understand buttons, or clasps, or brooches, or stitches, or knitting, or cross stitch, or embroidery, or weaves, or brass belt buckles, or watches, or jewellery, or gemstones, or jade, or felling, or felt, or silks, or suedes, or cotton, or linen, or cashmere, or pleats, or collars, or jackets, or skirts, or shirts, or shorts, or trousers, or pants, or bras, or blouses, or butterfly pins, or safety pins, or needles, or thread. 

He didn't understand how it was made. He didn't understand how it was used, and he didn't understand why it was such an important part of society. 

But that wasn't the last of it - the way clothing had evolved from survival tools to status items, from a rarity to a commonplace, from skins and furs to silks and cottons was one of the biggest changes that took him the longest to understand. The way the colour purple went from one of the rarest and most highbrow symbols in modern society (he means twenty-five thousand years ago) to a widely available dye (the 1950’s) within such a short period was  _ astounding _ . How did something so rare and unavailable become so… normal?

“Synthetic dyes,” Julien sniffed, “Yes, very normal these days. With plastic and oil came a lot of useful stuff, but that’s what it’s like when we discover new things - we just fill every available space with it until it runs out. The wonders of modern technology, isn't it? It’s like ivory. We kill all the elephants we see, and as soon as we run out of their tusks, we make our own. Plastic. Amazing stuff.” 

According to Pat, clothes had become something of a wonder, not just being used to evade temperatures or predators, but as a means of expression. 

“Like this piece here,” he said, indicating to one of the frowning men in a painting on the wall, “He’s got red clothes and a big poofy collar. I’m no expert, but I think that meant he was an important member of society. And this woman’s earrings! She looks to be somewhere in the 1700s, so those pearl earrings were imports, and probably cost a lot. And here!” Pat gestured to the largest painting of them all, a two meter landscape of a hunting party chasing a fox, “The riders are all wearing red and white, probably to make them easier to see by the other party members, but the horses are covered in tassels and fancy pieces, so they're probably of a lot of importance too. Makes me wonder if they were selling the fox skins once they caught the poor thing.”

“Eat the fox?” He asked, for the sake of holding a conversation.

“Maybe,” Pat chuckled, “Although, they may have stuffed the skin instead of turning it into a scarf or something. Put it on display, and all that. Horrible, really. It’s horrible how horrible history can be.”

Robin nodded along, and eventually, got bored and walked off. 

Sometimes when faced with the others fancy outfits and half-outfits (Julien, again), it did feel a little bit sad to be the only one missing out in the craze of fabric and frills. All of them, aside from himself and Mary, were rather well off in the clothes department, especially Kitty and Lady Fanny, who during their lifetimes threw away any clothing they didn't like, and god forbid it had a stain or hole in it. If he had a choice in the matter, he personally would had gone for something like Pat was wearing - suitable for the outdoors, appropriate footwear, and not covered in heavy medals that could get caught on anything (cough,  _ Captain) _ . 

Maybe, though, he would want his clothes to be purple. Just as a nod to the past. 

**Status**

Robin had no status, never had any status, and when he was alive, was considered to be worth just as much as any man, woman, or child was. People died all the time back then, so anyone who could carry their weight was considered worthy of respect, and anyone who couldn't carry their weight because of an illness, injury or pregnancy was considered worthy of even more. Not many survived childbirth, and injuries generally were not recovered from. He’d once seen a hunter woman have her arm taken off in a landslide, only to survive and then die gangrene a few weeks later. 

The past wasn't a fun place to be. 

The present wasn't a fun place to be either.

Death, like time, like rivers, was an inevitability. The poor died. The rich died. The underclass died, and the soldiers died. The most noble still passed in both quiet and loud ways, and the criminals passed in much the same way. 

Status did not mean avoiding death, status meant delaying it and avoiding a painful one. 

Robin, with no status, died vomiting his lungs out and becoming too weak to walk. Fanny, with a lot of status, died from a fall that she didn't have the hignsight to avoid. And the Captain.

“It doesn't matter how I died,” he declared, “what matters is that I’m going to tell you about Singapore in 1941, and how we thrashed the Japanese to pieces!” 

“Churchill called the Battle of Singapore one of the greatest failures in British military history.” Julian sniffed, focusing on the chess board and not the Captain and his audience on the couch.

“Yes, well,” the Captain sniffed, “I am going to do as Thorne does and tell you a fictional version of how it  _ should  _ have happened, or at least what would have happened if I was there.” 

“I don't make things up, I put feelings into  _ words! _ None of you understand my art!” 

“Thing like thing, we know,” Robin glared as Julian described his move on the board.

“I have you know,” Thomas’ voice warbled as he stood from his side lean, “That I was a respected member of the Suffolk Poetry Society, and I was known not for  _ thing like thing, _ ” he spat the words out like they were poisonous, “but for love! I wrote about love! It’s impossible for a low-life like you to understand it-”

“Ay!” Robin stood too, his legs phasing through the chessboard, “I know love!”

“Love didn't exist in the  _ cave man times. _ ”

“Might not be ‘Kissy kissy’, but I know!” he felt his body shift into the hunting stance, with one foot in front of the other and his eyes trained directly onto Thomas, “I know! I know what feels like when brother dies. I know what feels like when you with someone for life! I know love!”

“Oh, pray tell then,” Thomas scoffed, “Who have you loved?”

“Family,” he said, voice quiet. No one said anything for a moment, and Thomas’ proud smile slipped off into a frown, “Is not kissy kissy, but… is love. Was.”

Kitty looked between them, Pat’s eyes flickered around the room to see either a way to resolve or postpone the situation, and the Captain, holding his stick in hand, looked at his boots. 

“I… suppose that counts as love too.”  Thomas admitted, “I suppose I just hadn't thought about it like that.”

“Thing like thing. Love like family, family like love. Family sometimes not people who are part of you, but… become.” 

The Captain cleared his throat. “That’s a very wise thing to say, Robin.”

“I agree,” Pat said as well, smiling at him in a genuine way that no one could ever hope to replicate, “It’s both wise and true.”

“Perhaps… perhaps I was wrong calling you low-life.”

Robin scoffed, “Am not low-life. Am low-dead.”

Most of them chuckled, aside from Thomas who rolled his eyes fondly, and Fanny who rolled her eyes and left the room.

He might not understand status, but he understood love just fine.

**Love**

(see also: Status; War)

**War**

War means war.

“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” - Herbert Hoover

“All is fair in love and war.” - Ronnie Milsap

“Only the dead have seen the end of War.” - Plato

The last one obviously wasn't true. 

In 1943 Button House was temporarily used as a hospital after the one in the nearest city got bombed beyond immediate repair. Serious, long term patients were sent there for recovery, as the fresh air and countryside was deemed good for the body and mind. Soldiers often appeared there too from the training ground roughly five miles North, where planes were stored and sent out across North Sea into Germany, Denmark, Norway, and other Nazi occupied countries. 

After fizzing out one of the lightbulbs during surgery of one patient, Robin wisely decided not to mess with the medical equipment.

The buried the patient’s body off site at the request of the present Button family, and of the patient’s family. 

“What is one death among thousands?

What is one soldier among the dead?

What is one lost soul left wandering,

When this place will be his deathbed?” 

Thomas finished his lyric over the operation table, just as they removed the body from the room and the two nurses, dressed in pale blue and white, began to disinfect and clean the room. He didn't bother looking to Robin as he left, too absorbed in his own little world of poetry and misery to consider how the caveman might be feeling. Ironic, considering his apparent care for the emotions internal. 

Robin didn't stop him, and stayed out the way as the two nurses continued to scrub down the room.

The Captain wasn't a patient at the hospital, but another captain was. Captain James Hawthorn with soft brown hair and hard brown eyes, who the Captain was sent to check on, made a full recovery after becoming deaf from being too close to an explosion, but just as the Captain and Captain Hawthorn were leaving, something happened and the Captain collapsed. 

Robin wasn't there, none of them were, so it felt like one moment there were six of them, and then suddenly seven. Introductions didn't go well.

“You stay the bleeding hell away from me, you ape!” he waggled his swagger stick at Robin, backing away from his own dead body, “I don't know what the devil is going on, but I’ll have you know that if you come any closer- Ah!” He jumped forward as his back hit Humphrey’s body, and when he turned and saw what he had touched, became green in the gills and gave up staying in the entryway. Two steps at a time he climbed the stairs to the second floor, ducking around the chief nurse and asking her back, “Hello? Can you see - hear - me?” 

She walked briskly on, so with one last look down the stairs at where Robin, his body, Humphrey’s body, and Captain Hawthorn were, he disappeared into the hallway leaving to the East wing. 

“Ape?” Robin asked Humphrey, but received no response. “Am no ape. Am man! Almost.”

The Captain, as it turned out, had two loves - Captain Hawthorn, and the art of war (not to be confused with the book, which he admittedly liked very much as well). He never admitted to loving the other captain, but it was obvious with the context already provided and with the lowered, half-lidded look he developed when talking about him. It seemed like the Captain was better at knowing love than Thomas ever had been, and he didn't solely focus on the flesh kind. 

“Guns,  _ guns _ ! The most wonderful invention that has ever graced this earth, let me tell you, we’ve come a long way from flintlocks and pistols. Semi-automatic mounted machine guns are state of the art on any fort, and battleship cannons are no longer ball and chains to tear at wood!”

The Captain warmed up significantly when Fanny asked him about what it was like overseas, but he never mentioned the places, only what it was like to drive a tank over foreign soil, or to feel the waves of an unknown ocean spray you in the face. Never the people, the architecture, the food or the time spent outside of the battle, only the gunpowder, the machinery, and the glory of seeing your own blood on your clothes. Not that the Captain would know about that. 

(Thomas, on the other hand, avoided as much of this talk as possible.)

**Plastic**

(See also: Clothes)

“Plastic is the best thing to have ever been invented by mankind.”

“ _ Human _ kind.” said Pat, glancing at Kitty. She didn't seem to care.

“It can be moulded into any shape, made into any substance, and can be used in any way. It’s a liquid, hard as rock, soft like dough and can be completely food safe. We make it into clothes, we use it to catch food, it keeps us warm and protects us from the wet and wind. It can catch fire, but can also be made to  _ not  _ catch fire.”

“What it made of?”

Julian paused in his speech, not really knowing what to say, but then stated, “It’s made from oil. Dug up from the ground.”

“Ground?”

“Yes.”

“Made from what?”

“Dead plants, mostly. Compressed over time to liquid. It’s very flammable.”

He thought it over, one hand holding his chin.

“Can be wood?”

“Yes, old wood, but it can be made of wood.”

“No, no. Made  _ into _ wood?”

“Yes! They make benches and things out of them these days.”

“Can be ground?”

“Astroturf. Artificial grass.”

“Can be fish?”

“Fake fish, yes. For looking at, or toys.”

“Can be food?”

Julian seemed to consider this, taking his time to look at the ceiling where it met two walls, and then said, “Well, it can be used to make fertiliser, which makes plants grow stronger, so I suppose in a way it can be…”

He paused again, but this time didn't pick up from where he left off, and after watching Julian watch the wall for a few minutes, Robin decided he had enough of doing nothing there and went to do nothing somewhere else. 

**Reading**

(See also: Writing; Poetry; Books)

Thomas was a writer, of sorts, but the real reader of the ghosts was Fanny. 

She was an educated woman, or as educated as an Edwardian woman could be for her time, and spent what time she could doing one of two things - telling her children or maids what to do, or reading. She rarely talked about what she read unless asked (which made a change from everyone else), and tended to recite the tales in general, but still rather nice, ways. 

Kitty was one to pick up on her telling these stories, and actively encouraged them when she could.

“Oh please, Fanny, tell us the one about the Darling children and Peter again!” 

“‘The Little White Bird?’ Well, I suppose I can, but only if you sit down to listen. And only if you don't interrupt me!” 

She also knew more than stories, and explained to the ghosts of the house about all sorts - gardening, cooking, the proper placement of silverware at the dinner table, and how to appropriately light a candle stick in the company of men. It was all rather unnecessary, Robin thought, but with her upbringing and time period, he supposed it was just her way of being.

**Writing**

(See also: Reading; Poetry; Books)

Thomas missed writing like a man in a desert missed water. He missed it like how a caged bird misses the sky, like how a bee misses flowers in winter, like how an insomniac misses sleep, how a rose misses light. 

He missed writing like they all missed food, the feeling of sunlight on their skin, being able to feel the mattress beneath their back, or the earth beneath their feet.

They all missed writing sometimes, because the urge to put thoughts to page was strong, but most of them got over it and went somewhere private to speak their thoughts aloud. 

Thomas intentionally sought them out to complain about how he couldn't put thoughts to page. He didn't get over it, not even three hundred years into the future. 

Like dripping water of a stalagmite in a cave, he whined and whined and moaned and complained. 

Like lightning, Robin snapped at him to shut up.

But lightning can only do so much to a cave.

**Poetry**

(See also: Writing; Reading; Books) 

“I am an albatross lost at sea,

Awaiting the land which will never be.

Arise the horizon’s new morning sun,

And warm my frozen feathers through.

I wish for land and see nothing more,

But salted water, and no shore.”

“ _ Shut the hell up, Thorne!” _

_ “You don't understand my art!” _

**Books**

(See also: Writing; Poetry; Reading)

“Books, books, all around, and not a thing to read.”

**Religion**

The most confusing thing wasn't status, or clothes, or love, or buttons, or books, or reading, or plastic, or houses, or diseases, or poisonous berries that look  _ just like the normal ones _ , but instead is religion. The guy who thought of it originally must be a very rich guy, if only they had royalties all those years ago. 

Countless people knelt by their bedside each night and held their hands to their chest or face, hundreds pledged things that they would do for the sake of security after death, and sometimes by  _ not  _ doing those things people died - he would advise you talk to Mary about it, but on second hand, don't. There were a few different kinds of religion, from what Robin could tell, including the kind that demanded food (which was dumb, why give away perfectly good food?), the ones that just wanted you to pledge allegiance, and some in foreign worlds that asked for blood, death, or fire. 

“‘Fire and brimstone’ weren’t too accurate in the end, was it?” Pat said, “Although I hardly lead the most sinful life.”

“I did. My hell is listening to them,” Julian pointed with his thumb over his shoulder at the Captain and Thomas, “God knows it’s painful enough.” 

“Hell be where the swans is,” Mary nodded solemnly, “When swans be calm, the devil be busy. Hell is swans when they be angry, or geese! They be worser.” 

Fanny scoffed, “Hell is certainly not here in Button house. Perhaps in the basement, but not in the house.”

“Below be part of house, no?” Robin asked, confused.

She sputtered, “That  _ plague pit _ ,” she spat, “Is  _ not  _ part of my house. It might be attached, but it is not the same building!” 

Was death a religion? Was disease? The people down in the basement seemed to treat it as a religion, with how they intentionally deprived themselves of talking when the lights were off. Maybe it was like lent, like how the Captain once said he was giving up going outside for lent and lasted about three days. The people downstairs had been doing it for a lot longer than three days though, so he wasn't entirely sure what to think of it.

Kitty liked to tell them all about the mad religious people she had heard about when she was alive, rather than her own religious (or lack of) practices, such as a man she heard about, a mountain man, who ate lambs raw to appease the devil. Another story she had was of a woman who walked through the woods naked, her hair covering her beasts when she lured men into the shrubs for sex, only to dig her teeth into their neck and drink their blood. 

“Vampires,” she said, “like in ‘ _ The Vampyre’ _ . They're awfully frightening things, bloated corpses of recently killed people that rose from the dead!”

“I wasn't aware you read,” The Captain said lightly.

“Oh, I didn't! Fanny told me about them.” She smiled with teeth, but it wasn't obvious if it was just one of her toothy grins or a nod to the creature she had just described. Nevertheless, the Captain swallowed and watched her return her attention to the rest of the group. “Should I tell you all this story my step-father told me when I was younger? Not about vampires, unfortunately, but beware, it’s a  _ ghost story! _ ” 

Out of them all, Kitty often ended up in the unfortunate position of not having much to say, especially with her sheltered and short upbringing, but whenever she told stories like this, ones recited from her family, it always drew a crowd - Even Thomas couldn't help but listen, though beneath him he may call it. 

**Ghosts**

 

“It’s my turn to tell a story tonight!”

_ It was a dark and stormy night, where the wind and rain came down in sheets upon the wooden house upon the moor, where even on the clearest of days nothing could be seen for miles. There were three people living in this house, a mother called Laura, a child called Penny, and a father called Hugo. They moved to the moor recently, and only stayed there after selling their previous house. _

_ That night, when the wind howled and the windows shook, a ghostly moan came through the window, and although wrapped tight in bed, all three of them awoke in an instant.  _

_ “What was that?” Young Penny asked, already leaning out of the warm covers in shock.  _

_ “It’s the wind,” Laura tried, but even she did not sound so certain.  _

_ They all waited in complete silence, aside from the rain coming down and the wind coming through the house’s seems, but then again, faint as fingertips against skin, the long warbling moan came through again and shook them more than the weather ever could. _

_ “Some poor soul is trapped on the moor,” Hugo announced, pulling himself out of the sheets and slipping into his boots, “They must be, you know how the mud pools get.” _

_ “Oh, please don't go out there, Hugo,” Laura grasped at his sleeve, “You said it yourself, it’s dangerous out there when you can see, let alone when you can't!”  _

_ But Hugo persisted, and with his thick leather-skinned jacket and lantern, he went out into the moor, his footfalls sloshing and becoming distant, before they could be heard no more.  _

_ The ghastly moan returned a good half hour later, when neither of the women in the house were asleep but listening intently for then Hugo would return. Thinly, like a phantom figure, Laura rose from the bed as well.  _

_ “Oh, please don't go out there, mother,” Penny begged, “Father knows what he is doing! You said it yourself, it’s dangerous out there when it’s like this!”  _

_ “I’m only going to look,” Laura attempted to sooth her daughter, “Just to see if I can see him.” _

_ Easing herself from the bed, Penny could see the front door from the bedroom, and watched as her mother went to the door and opened it. _

_ Laura gasped, “A light! A light on the moor! He’s stuck out there!” and before Penny could stop her, Laura was out the door like a shot, her bare feet sloshing through the rain and disappearing into the darkness as well. _

_ Now, Penny was a smart girl, and headed the tales she heard of the moor. She closed the door tight, making sure that only a key could open it, and boiled herself some tea over the fire while she waited until morning.  _

_ When morning came, she donned her father’s pair of wet weather boots and her hat for windy days and took her leave, making sure to close the door behind her. Across the moor, directly across from their house, was a figure with a bright patch on their chest, visible from at least a few hundred yards away, but when she waved, the figure did not wave back. _

_ Irked, she pulled her skirt up and took voyage across the moor. Squelching through the mud, one step at a time, she came closer and closer to the figure, who’s clothes moves in the wind, but body did not. Then finally, as she drew closer, she realised why.  _

_ It was a scarecrow with a mirror shard strapped to its chest that must have reflected the light from their house, and a sign not immediately visible. She went to take a step closer, but paused to look. _

_ A cave entrance, maybe fifty foot deep lay before her. She snapped her foot back for at the bottom, in a crumpled pile, lay her parents. The scarecrow’s smiling face looked at her, the sign on its chest read ‘Warning! Cave!’, and the wind entering the mouth of the cave caused a warbling moan to sound out across the moor.  _

“That wasn't a very good ghost story, Kitty, there weren’t even any ghosts!” Thomas cried, “You can't have a ghost story without ghosts!” 

She put her hands on her hips and huffed, looking at him sharply, “Well, considering it’s my first time telling it, I think I did rather well!”

Pat stood, as he usually did when addressing the group, “Yes, Kitty, I think you did very well, and it was an interesting story too! It’s not often that mother nature is revealed to be the one that kills people mysteriously, although that poor girl seeing her parents at the bottom of the cave must have been quite gruesome… anyway, as scheduled, tomorrow Mary will tell us about the time she first saw a hawk!” He nodded at her, “Very exciting.” 

**Power**

(See also: Status)

Julian was a powerful man.

Key word: Was. 

His death came as he did - hard, unexpected, and fast. No one saw it coming (apart from the man he was with at the time), especially since this…  _ ritual  _ was a commonplace when he owned the house. Anonymous people in, up to the west wing master bedroom, and then out the next day. 

Julian was a powerful man, and with that power came lovers, publicity, and finally, humiliation on death. He never called it a humiliation, always holding his head high as if to say, “Yeah I died shagging, so what? Are you saying you died in a better way?”

He also had theories, none of which were confirmed, but all of which made him seem more powerful.

“I’ve survived assassination attempts in the past, so if it was an assassination, it must have been something they slipped into my drink.”

“If it  _ was  _ a heart attack, then what a way to go! They're usually brought on by a fast heartbeat, so I guess you could say it was getting a thorough work out.”

“Scorned lover, maybe. Who knows who they were with beforehand, or during! I was known for picking my choices with a close eye, but we all make mistakes sometimes. Mine must have been at the wrong time…”

The reality was a lot less glamorous because he didn't actually die shagging, but bringing up the truth made Fanny hit them over the head and yell until her lungs gave out, so no one ever did, which Julian was more than okay with. 

It was bad enough that the public knew a lie, but god forbid they know the truth.

**Moon**

(See also: Love)

The moon, originally, didn't have a name. 

It was just present, like trees, rocks and grass was. It stayed, looking above everything in a calm, blue hue, it’s faces changing appearance but never in meaning. The moon was capable of being loved, and in turn, reflected love back onto the earth.

Trees rotted and fell, rocks eroded, and grass dried, died, and regrew. The moon stayed, always the same, always calming, even in the most hopeless of days. 

Robin had been alone for an awfully long time. Sixty thousand years was an awfully long time. Sixty thousand years wasn't long enough for the moon to leave him, but it was long enough to gain a few more beauty marks. 

At points the woods were too thick to see the moon, and he moved all over his territory to try and see it clearly, and sometimes he was so sick with misery that even the moon with her gentle face and wondrous beauty couldn't calm him, but still she watched on, unwavering and present. 

For far too long the moon was his only friend, company and solace, so he looked to the moon and waited in the rain for company. Even when people built things around him, when animals grazed at his feet, and when the sun beat down onto his face on unrelenting summer days, he stood, still as a tree and immovable as a mountain, for the moon.

He would do anything if it meant the moon would stay with him. Die thrice over, sell his soul to the sun, anything. 

He didn't even know what the moon was at first, but the moon became his everything. Nothing else ever mattered as much.

Until something did.

**Family**

(see also: Status)

Like the moon, originally family wasn't a word but a feeling. It wasn't just the person that birthed him or the people he helped birth, it was all of them as a collection who worked, lived, and cooked together. He only knew his actual brother was his brother because they looked similar, but all of the males in his colony were his brothers in some way. It wasn't blood or status or anything else that didn't matter. It was companionship, loyalty, and bettering yourself and your surroundings for the sake of others.

Robin wasn't entirely sure when it all went wrong. Probably when money started to become a thing.

Family was still about companionship and loyalty, but also about blood, money, and power. When you had money, you had options, and if you had options, you had power. It was a vicious, vicious cycle that everyone without money could recognise but couldn't do anything about unless they  _ had  _ money. 

Family became who gave you power. Money became the main concern to families. Communities crumbled to ash and dust when money ran out. Greed was everywhere - baked into the bread and swimming in the water.

Slowly, Robin became bitter, sinking in on himself when it came to this new type of human that lived off his lands and under his moon. They didn't co-exist for the sake of community, but for the simple reason that they were forced to, and treated one another as such. There was a coldness to these groups, often made of numbers double or triple his own community of the past, and when they took it too far, it was just  _ too far. _

At some point when they were still wielding axes and living in wooden ‘A’ shaped houses, a policy came in. He wasn't aware of it until it was demonstrated. A starving man who lived outside and ate scraps people gave him took some bread without handing over coins, and when he was caught, they killed him. They didn't care that he was starving, or that he had no house or warm clothing, but only for the fact that he took from them with no other choice. 

It made his blood boil.

This wasn't family, or community, or love. This was greed over material, avoidable if the guy with the most coins actually spent them instead of keeping them to himself. And what's worse, what really rubbed it in, was that it  _ kept happening _ , and not even for the sake of coins.

Mary died due to someone suffering with an illness and blindly blaming it on her, who wanted her dead as well to see if it cured them (which of course it wouldn't, Robin knew the disease came from the person leaving their bread in water overnight like an idiot) and started a crazed spiral of lies throughout the village.

“Witch! Witch!” They cried at anyone and anything, and in the end their village of maybe one hundred got reduced to ninety, with eight women and two girls being burnt or stoned or drowned. The craze continued, quietly at times but sometimes boiling over, and spread throughout the land, to the extent where strangers to the village suspected that certain people were cursed, not by their actions or through knowing them, but by a particular look in their eyes - And in the craze of witchcraft and villainy in the 1500’s, more fell as victims of circumstance. 

“I were never a witch, me.” Mary always said when it somehow got brought up, “Witches be the devil’s, and there be no devil ‘ver in me. No, sir. No devils here.”

“‘There is no devil in hell, Mr. Holmes’,” Fanny whispered to herself sometimes when she looked upon the portrait of her husband, only ever when she was most certain no one was watching. “Indeed, there isn't. ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’.” 

There was one similarity between all the ghosts of Button house, however, which no one noticed until the young couple moved in and Kitty began to question herself. “Where do babies come from, Robin?” She asked, “I only ask because Julian, Alison, Pat and Lady Fanny were no help. I was wondering if you could tell me.”

He thought about it for a moment, “Babies?”

“Yes, babies. Or children.”

“Is from shag.”

“Shag?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean like a carpet?”

“Yes. Can be done on carpet too.”

“But what is the  _ act _ , you know? How is it done? I know a position is involved somehow.”

“You, uh,” He gestured out in front of himself, rounding his hands over an invisible object and smoothing it over, then said, “Yes.”

“... A cow?”

“No!” 

“Then what! What is it?”

“Another.” 

“Another person?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to understand. “So that’s what Fanny meant about a bee liking other bees… Thank you, Robin!” She cried, and skipped away, “I must go tell the Captain that I know what he meant now!”

“Meant what?” 

“Stand at attention! I must go tell him that I know what it  _ really  _ means!” 

He watched her go, shaking his head to get rid of the confusion once she was out of the room, “Cows? Bees? Attention? Kitty…” 

It wasn't easy, seeing humanity get consumed by greed to the extent where they would kill one another for gold, but becoming acquainted with complete strangers wasn't as bad as once thought. Mary just seemed to accept death, after denouncing her entire village of course, and was more than ready to accept Robin as a new associate. Everyone else wasn't as easy, as all of them had friends, family, people they knew and loved and were loved and known in return. Some of them were bitter about death, wishing to just be laid to rest and forgotten with the passage of time, and others wished for a greater achievement before their passing, like Thorne with his poetry and Julian. 

No one there ever  _ really  _ wanted to die, and even when Thomas made stupid comments or suggestions, he never actually meant it. What made it most unfortunate was that all of them died prematurely, before it was intended, and while that was pretty common back when he was alive, for the rest of them…

“If I hadn't,” Julian side-glanced at Fanny, “ _ died prematurely _ , I would still be alive right now in this house, and I could have paid for the renovations! I was awfully rich, don't you know.”

“Is that why you filed for bankruptcy?” Alison asked, not looking up from the screen-with-people-in. 

He looked at her, “Have you been reading up on me?” 

“I've been looking up  _ all of you _ , to the best that I can, and some of you have some pretty interesting history! Unfortunately for you though, Julian, you were a public figure, so there’s a lot about you online.”

He scowled at her, “I don't appreciate you going behind my back like that-”

“It was all over the news ten years ago, I’d hardly call ‘reading’ going behind your back.”

Finally, he looked away and exited through the wall. 

“Have you really been reading about all of us?” Fanny had to ask, “Did you find out about anything they thought happened with me?”

“Well,” Alison looked at Fanny, obviously uncomfortable, “They believed you just fell. Your…” 

“You can say it.”

“You got upset the last time.”

“No, I won't get upset this time. You can say it.

“Your… Husband-”

Fanny let out a stream of expletives, her fists shaking at her sides and looking away from Alison.

“-said you must have tripped on the rug in the bedroom, since it was one with tassels. He also said that you had arthritis, so your knees were stiff and that might have caused it.”

She seemed to calm down a little, “So at least he knew  _ that  _ much about me, even if he cared for nothing else.” She looked at Alison again, “Thank you. I’m glad they're not spreading  _ awful lies about me _ , even if they're believing my husband’s ones that cover himself.”

Alison gave her a tight lipped, awkward smile. 

“Is there anything about me?” Thomas asked, because of course he did, “Did they talk about how I was murdered? Who did it? Let’s be honest, we  _ know  _ who did it-”

“They said you were shot from behind with a pistol, and they hung the groundskeeper as he was the only one with access to the gunpowder.” She shrugged, “It’s a compelling argument, if I didn't know otherwise.”

Thomas shuffled, and if he had feathers they would be bunched, “The  _ groundskeeper? _ What would he have to do with it?! I understand that he kept the guns under lock and key, but unless he had command from one of the  _ family _ , no one would get in! I swear, them throwing Mr. Higgsbury under the carriage like that is  _ most  _ unfair. He was like family to me!” 

Robin looked up from the chess board, suddenly interested. 

“He always took me out hunting, even if the rest of the party wasn't interested in having me. I don't understand what it is with this trend of the police accusing family and friends of being the killers, it just doesn't make sense.”

“It’s for the drama, the scoundrels don't care for family. Besides, if this were to happen with another family, let’s say, they would naturally assume it's them too. Your friends are close, but your enemies are closer…” 

Thomas scoffed, “That is ridiculous. If there were actual problems in the family, then by all means, but otherwise? Preposterous.” 

“Those men in uniform were only trying to do their jobs, I assure you.”

“Guys,” Alison interrupted, “Please.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry, Alison,” Thomas ducked his head, and glaring at the Captain, he made his leave, “I just wish  _ others  _ were a bit more understanding.” 

The silence Thomas left in was overwhelming, echoing from each corner of the room and reverbing around them, and with the moment being held like a spider on a strand of web, Robin felt the need to break the silence. Stepping forward to be behind Alison, he spoke up.

“Is there… thing about my time?”

She looked over her shoulder at him. “Your time?” She asked, “You mean about your period in history?”

“Yes.”

Alison didn't say anything, and looked for a moment like she was in deep thought, but then she turned back to her laptop and typed something in. “I don't suppose you know how long you've been, well, dead, do you? It’ll make searching easier.”

“No, don't know. Can… describe things? What was like?”

“Sure.”

“We lived in hut. Long time ago, was a river here, big, we used to fish. No of the… hairy elephants. Used tools, stone tips, and lived with one another in hut. All as one.”

Typing into the laptop (or to him, the magic metal slate), she paused and then turned the screen to him. It was an illustration of men and women in skins by a waterfront, some of them with spears in hand and knee deep in the water, but most working with their hands by the shore, with stone tools and pieces of flint that they were whittling down. Robin leaned in to look at the picture closer.

“No trees,” he said, “Is not here.”

“Yeah, but it’s similar though, right? Fishing, community, and stone tools. Was that at least the same?”

“Yes…”

She looked at him, her brow furrowed, “Are you alright? Was it not what you wanted?”

“No, no, is good. Am… glad. Others,” he gestured vaguely to the empty room, “Have bad time with past. Mine is… long ago, no one knows. They think we good. We family. We nice.”

“Were you?” Alison looked genuinely curious, and not like she just really wanted to be left alone like she had when Thomas was in the room five minutes ago. 

He smiled, only a little lift at the corner of the mouth, “Yes. Had to be, or else. I miss them.” 

Her smile was tight lipped, but undeniably there, the kind of smile you would give someone when you didn't quite know what to say, but she still managed to speak up.

“I suppose it’s a good thing you can't lose your current family, then.”

“What?”

“You know- the others. You're all already dead, so nothing can take them away from you now, and nothing can take you away from them. I know it’s not… a perfect way of looking at it, but you got to admit it’s better than just feeling like you've lost everything.” She paused for a moment, and while he wasn't looking at her, it was obvious he was deep in thought.

It was an odd thing, seeing Robin so focused on processing what she said. He sometimes did it when they said something complex, or said a lot of things at once, but making that face out of consideration instead of confusion was unusual indeed. A caveman, by all means the most basic kind of human being out there, taking time and patience to consider what someone else said, even when it wasn't necessarily something he understood, was far from a usual sight. If the room wasn't so serious or tension-filled, it might have even been comical. 

“We. Us ghosts. Family?”

“Of a sort, I suppose. Family doesn't have to be the people you're related to.”

“Know that. Just didn't see it.” 

Smiling at him again, she turned to the laptop once more, clearly saying that the conversation was over, but still Robin’s mind thought about the concept, running over it like he was scanning it. Were these people, who he had known for only five hundred years at most, really his new found family? Were they really the community like what he used to have? 

It was too much to think about at once, so like Thomas and the Captain had, he disappeared to have a think about it.

**Words**

Words were hard to find.

Scattered all over the place, made up on the spot, and pulled and pushed into every combination imaginable, it was reasonable to say that Robin wasn't the most familiar with the way they always worked. He could understand the basics - he knew when someone was talking about a  _ thing _ , for example - but when it came to descriptions and speaking for himself, it was always a bit more of a struggle getting his point across.

And as with everything else, it was changing. Constantly.

Tally ho changed to marvellous changed to awesome changed to sick, and that was just one example among millions. There must be millions of words as well, he always thought, because people just kept making them up.

What did he think before there was language? He used to speak in grunts and groans, so did he used to think in the way he spoke too? 

Finding the words was hard enough, but putting them into effect was harder.

The moon shone high above Button House, a crescent the size of his fingernail in the sky and lighting up the gardens in an eerie bluish hue, somehow both supernatural and comforting at once. Robin made his way through the high walls of the kitchen garden, using a shortcut to the long-dead fountain in the middle of the ornamental sitting area. 

It had been a long time since the gardens had been seen to properly. Occasionally a gardener came to cut the grass and trim the hedges near the entrances to the house, but that was only once a month, and in the late summer night-time, the whole place looked like a bit of an overgrown mess, with brambles climbing the marble benches and the roses going out of control across paths. None of these things disturbed him, however, and as he passed each Alison’s words became clearer and clearer.

As he had done so long ago, he had created a family between himself and his other haunters, making them all into a kind of tight knit community by complete accident. After so long alone, he finally had the thing that he had wished for since death, and he hadn't even been able to see it at first with his own two eyes. 

He hadn't noticed that he cared, deeply and unwavering, for these new people. 

There just were not words for that kind of feeling. 

**Another**

Pat was always kind, he cared deeply and his responsibility unwavering, regardless of who it was to. He did, however, occasionally break this vow of respect and call some of them out on their behaviour, especially if it was at someone else’s detriment, like when Robin wanted both Alison and Mike dead for their wish to turn the house into a hotel.

Kitty was naive, but sweet at the same time, and while she had no wish to be involved in some of Robin’s stranger habits, she was more than willing to go where the rest of the party went, even if she didn't really understand it very well. 

Julian taught Robin chess, and didn't mind speaking normally around him despite Robin’s tendency to misunderstand things. That was just it though, Julian liked to talk, and even if Robin wasn't really in a position to listen and give feedback, Julian saw that more as an upside than a downside. 

The Captain was one of the people in the household that Robin, at first, hated with an absolute burning passion. He was stuck in his time, refusing to budge when confronted with new problems, and immediately saw himself as a leader. What warmed Robin over wasn't a sudden change of personality (the Captain was always going to be a man of his time), but instead the fact that the Captain treated them  _ all  _ like that. Thomas was lazy, Fanny a stuck up, and Robin was going out of his way to do what the Captain wouldn't like. It was equal, and in the Captain’s eyes, everyone was under his command, even if he was the only one that knew it.

Humphrey was an odd one. Every time he found his head, he lost it, but in the brief moments that Robin and he interested, he always had something interesting to say, usually an observation. In the attic, when it was a particularly bitter winter in the 1800s, pigeons used to roost in the rafters. When the fountain in the garden  _ did _ work, the water was green. Sometimes, in the dead of night, a barn owl landed on the fence outside. Things like that.

Fanny didn't like anyone. Similarly, to the Captain, she saw everyone as beneath her, and refused to adjust to everyone else’s quirks and needs. She didn't like mess, so seeing dust on the surfaces at first made her irrationally angry, then distraught at the loss of her family’s prestige, and finally after years and years of continuing to exist in the decaying space, acceptance. And eventually, over time, she came to accept them all too (even if she did like to complain about them sometimes).

Mary was the first one to come to the house as a spirit after Robin, and at that point, there was no house to be seen. He felt her pain, despised her people, and helped her in any way he could. She, completely willing to leave everything she’d ever known behind, accepted him and cared for him too. 

“Wasn’t theirs’s fault’s in ‘he ends,” She told him on a wintery night, when the moon was full and the space uninvaded by the house, “Was theirs’s minds. Believed in devils and curses, and were unawares theys were holdin’ the devil in theirs’s minds. As soon as they’s know of ‘he devil, is all they’d be thinkin’ about.” 

He nodded along, and wisely decided not to pick through her accent for her meaning. 

Thomas, or ‘Thorne’ as the Captain called him, was the most extravagant of the lot. Robin used to watch in interest how he behaved while he was alive, since there was little else to do when Thomas was involved, and he was usually the only one awake late into the night, but even he recognised the fact that Thorne was wasted as a poet and really should have become an actor instead. Thomas did teach Robin how to read and speak properly after he’d been ‘Poisoned by Mary’s commonness’ (his words, not Robin’s). 

Alison and Mike were totally different to the rest of them. 

She was shorter than most of them, apart from maybe Robin himself, and she had a serious but still light hearted attitude that she applied to almost everything. She was also filled with a kind of grim and bitter determination that the Captain said he hadn't seen since the war, and she rarely backed down from an argument if she really knew what she was talking about. She also was far trickier than they had anticipated initially, and almost always knew what to say to them. The downside to speaking to the dead, however, was not really knowing how to speak to the living. 

That was what Mike was for.

Although, to be fair, that’s a lie. Mike, after hearing from the plague ghosts in the basement, finally knew how to work the fuse box and boiler enough to get it going, and  _ did  _ know how to talk to people on a basic level, even if he totally awful at talking to people with initiative or an ulterior motive. That’s just who he was though - impressionable, trusting, and trying to see the best in everything if he could. He was also a bit of a realist.

“So… ghosts, huh?” He said, trying to make conversation with Alison.

“Yep.”

“Are they, uh, friendly?”

She looked up from the chessboard at him through her fringe, “They're getting there,” she admitted quietly, as if all of them were not listening silently to their conversation, “We’ve still got some issues to work out, but… we’ll cross that when we come to it.” 

He nodded awkwardly, “Cool. are they, you know, okay with us?”

She looked around at them all in turn, starting with Humphrey’s body and ending on Robin, and then she looked to Mike again. “I think they’re warming up to us.”

“Quite so,” the Captain agreed, “I don't mind if he- you! - if you stay here, so long as the film reels keep coming!” 

Mike raised an eyebrow at her, “They don't mind? The hotel thing?”

“Oh, we do,” Fanny assured him, and Alison relayed the message.

He sucked on his front teeth, obviously trying to find some way to persuade them (or the air, from his view) to let them continue. 

“Thing is…” Robin spoke up, “Hotel is here  _ now _ , not in hundred years. Is not always, only for so long.” 

Alison looked to Robin, then to Mike, “The caveman one says that it’s only temporary.”

“We’re planning on doing it until we get, like, un-broke though.” 

“But,” he continued, as if he was arguing with Mike, “I be here long time. Thing come. Thing go. Nothing stay but me, moonah, and sun. all us,” he gestured to them all, making sure Alison was watching, “forever. This not first house on my dead body. This not last house. Hotel stay, what, four hundred year, most? Maybe hundred if lucky? Is not forever. Three things forever. Us, moonah, and sun.”

“And trees,” Julian piped up.

“They fall.”

“What about rocks?” Kitty asked.

“Water wash away.”

“The sky?” tried Thomas.

“Day. Night. Changes, always different feel.” 

There was a profound moment of silence, where eight immortals and two mortals stood still in a quiet, dilapidated room, feeling technically unspoken words sink in like water into dry earth, slowly, then all at once. For the first time since his death, Robin felt like time stood still. Still as a rock, still as a tree, still as a frozen river. But then the ice cracked. 

“I think I get it, actually,” Mike interrupted the silent moment, “He’s saying he’s here forever, right? And I guess over time this’ll all change.”

She nodded, mute.

“This reminds me of a  _ Simpsons’  _ clip I watched when the previous owner fell asleep on the couch. ‘Don't forget, you're here forever’.” Julian snorted, “A likely story. I’m the most likely to find my light soon enough, don't you all worry.”

“I’m worrying,” Thomas admitted, “That he won't find it.” 

“I heard that-!” 

“It’s humbling,” Mike interrupted, “Thinking of it like that. I just can't imagine being immune to time like that.”

Mike tipped his baseball cap at Alison and then left, and subject to the awkward quiet, Alison picked herself up and left too. Then all the ghosts were looking back and forth at one another.

Pat picked up the slack.

“I think I can say from all of us, Robin, that we’re sorry we didn't recognise what you went through.”

“Yes, it’s difficult to recognise others pasts and needs sometimes,” the Captain agreed.

“We only know the time frame of and since our lives,” Kitty said.

There was a murmur of agreement from all seven of them, and Robin, with eyes kind and a smile on his admittedly unfortunate face, sighed at them.

“Is alright. What matter now is not now, is future.”

And the future, while uncertain in what it would bring, was more than certain to come to them eventually. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, please don't hesitate to leave Kudos, comments and bookmarks. 
> 
> I feel the need to say a few things about this fic -   
> 1\. it isn't proof read because cba, and if I did proof read it then it probably would have never been published  
> 2\. I hadn't watched the last episode for most of this fic - I watched it tonight (just before posting) and the unintentional canon compliant ending was totally unplanned!  
> 3\. I had no idea how to write, tag, name and describe this fic. It's based kind of on 'A Partial Dictionary Of The 21st Century By Captain Steve Rogers, US Army' by Copperbadge in style, but ultimately came about by itself. If you enjoy marvel and Steve/Tony, then I encourage you to check it out (it's E, btw)  
> 4\. I wasn't sure what to rate this fic either - Mature works always tend to be overshadowed by teen and explicit when it comes to hits, so I called it a teen for the sake of convenience   
> 5\. I love this little fandom, and I wrote this fic for the 5k prompt of 'family', but when it spiralled out of control I edited it for the 'Time' prompt instead. This was for the Ghosts Fanworks thing here: https://ghostsfanworks.tumblr.com 
> 
> Again, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed :D


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